High school counseling cuts concern admission staffers

STANFORD -- Stanford University admissions representatives who travel
across the country say they have been struck by the effects of budget-cutting
on high school counseling staffs, particularly in California.

While many public and private school counselors rolled out the red carpet
and rounded up enthusiastic, well-informed student audiences for the Stanford
recruiters, other counselors barely had time to answer the phone.

"In Los Angeles, it was very difficult for me even to schedule high school
visits," said Julie Taylor, one of a dozen Stanford admissions staffers who
gathered recently to review the university's fall outreach effort.

"I can remember one school where I'd call every day, all day, and students
kept answering the phone. There were no real administrators in the office.
Everything is breaking down - every little part of the system."

Some counselors didn't even manage to fill out recommendation forms for
their students. Stanford has received many counselor recommendation forms
filled out by teachers or principals instead, with attached notes explaining
that budget cuts have reduced or abolished their school counseling staffs.

"I have a general sense that counselors are much more overworked than they
used to be," said Annie Roskin, associate director of undergraduate
admissions. "The caseloads for high school counselors are now so heavy that
pre-college advising has taken a back seat."

Members of Stanford's Undergraduate Admissions staff visited about 600
high schools and about a dozen community colleges in the first few months of
the school year.

In addition to the usual questions about Stanford's selection process and
financial aid, a frequent topic of conversation was the potential effect of
budget cuts on undergraduate education at Stanford and colleges in general.

Worried by reports of trouble in the Cal State and University of
California systems, many high school students asked questions about class
sizes, the percentage of courses taught by teaching assistants, and whether
they would be able to graduate in four years.

Dean of Undergraduate Admissions James Montoya also found prospective
students and parents "more concerned than they were a few years ago about
physical safety," with questions about crime and earthquakes on the minds of
many non-Californians.

Montoya also said he has noticed more of a gap in recent years between
"the haves and have-nots."

"There are an increasing number of schools where students are at a clear
disadvantage compared to their counterparts of 10 or even five years ago," he
said.

"Resources are dwindling at these schools at the same time that they seem
to be increasing at a select number of private and public schools. This
discrepancy makes the selection process much more complex."

One thing that has gone up for nearly everyone is the level of anxiety
associated with the admissions process. Some schools are even calculating
their students' grade-point averages to the fourth decimal point.

"I don't remember this being such a big deal when I was in high school,"
said associate admissions director Jon Reider, an instructor in Stanford's
Structured Liberal Education Program, who visited schools in Boston and
Philadelphia, among others. "There is an urgency, a sense that this choice is
going to affect their whole lives."

Associate director of admissions Vince Cuseo, soon to be the director of
admissions at Grinnell College in Iowa, attributes much of the anxiety to the
state of the economy.

"There's a real threat of downward mobility now," said Cuseo, who visited
high schools in the Midwest.

"Students are worried that they're going to be worse off than their
parents. And it costs more to go to college now, so they want more bang for
the buck. Students are viewing college with much more of a consumer
orientation than they did in the past."

Despite recent reductions in the Undergraduate Admissions travel budget,
the staffers agreed that it was important to continue the individual high
school visits in poor urban and rural areas where students might not have
easy access to transportation.

In the suburbs, evening regional meetings for students and their parents
proved both cost-effective and popular, as did breakfast meetings with high
school counselors that were sponsored jointly by Stanford and other
universities.

So far this year, Stanford has received applications from 13,524 students
(see accompanying box). Reading their files will occupy admissions office
staffers from mid-January until late March. Letters of acceptance will be
mailed out during the first week of April.

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